"Kitty would be Jinkx's great-aunt," Hoffer says. "Kitty is a lot more concerned with keeping up appearances. Even though she's not a very high-brow person, she likes to pretend she is."

In "The Vaudevillians," Kitty is a songwriter from the Roaring '20s. Through an unfortunate turn of events, she and her husband-cowriter, Dr. Dan Von Dandy have been frozen for the past 90 years. But now they are back — and horrified to discover that today's pop artists have stolen their songs.

This sets the stage for jokes, bickering and taking a new look at familiar songs. Hits such as Cyndi Lauper's "Girls Just Wanna Have Fun" are re-orchestrated to sound as though they come from the '20s. The lyrics are left mostly intact but given a new context to create humor.

"We take songs we really like but give them more of a ragtime feel," Hoffer says. "Or we take songs we don't like and make them sound like Vaudeville so we do like them."

Von Dandy is played by Major Scales, the performing persona of Richard Andriessen. He and Hoffer created the show — Hoffer takes the lead on the dialogue, Andriessen on the music.

"We started writing it as a variety act when we were juniors in college together," Hoffer says. The two attended Cornish College of the Arts in Seattle.

"I've always been into the music of the 1920s and 1930s," Hoffer says. "It was a shared interest of ours."

The two have been working on the show for five of the six years they have lived together, Hoffer says. For a time, they performed it at a now-closed Seattle restaurant.

"It was like a dinner-theater show, but you didn't even have to pay admission," Hoffer says. "We put out a tip jar."

He's grateful his star turn on "RuPaul's Drag Race," which airs on the Logo network, opened doors.

"'Drag Race' gave me the exposure to propose doing the show in New York," he says. "Once people started seeing it, and the reviews started coming out, people realized it had very little to do with 'Drag Race.' It's a self-sustaining piece."

As an actor Hoffer, has played other notable roles: Angel in "Rent," Moritz in "Spring Awakening," the title character in "Hedwig and the Angry Inch," villainous Velma in "Hairspray." But he doesn't lose sight of his most-famous creation.